The Blessing of Gerson D. Cohen

"The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History" was surely not Gerson Cohen's most important piece of scholarly writing. Unlike many of his classic academic essays which are still assigned in university course in medieval Jewish history—his insightful overview of the gaonic age; his creative reconstruction of the story of the four captives; or his typological study of the varieties of Jewish messianism, to name only a few—it was meant to be no more than a public address, in this case offered to the graduating class of the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline, Massachusetts in June 1966.1